Archives for March 2017

In the usual case, employers that receive reasonable accommodation requests from their employees try to help. They may adjust a work schedule, grant a leave of absence, or even modify job duties. Too often, however, those same employers fail to grasp the broad scope of their ongoing duties to accommodate. They reach what they perceive as an end point based on their own interpretations of what’s reasonable, then refuse to help workers further. Decisions like that have a high potential to lead them into hot legal waters.

A recent Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) decision illustrates this point. The employer involved believed it bent over backwards, as it were, to help its employee. It gave her 12 weeks of FMLA leave, 23 weeks of part-time work, job relocation, and adjustments to avoid heavy lifting. Despite the seeming generosity of these accommodations — a fact expressly noted by the MCAD in its decision — the employer was tripped up when it refused to extend part-time work for three additional weeks so its employee could complete physical therapy and, hopefully, return to full-time work. Because the employer could not demonstrate that the continued leave would impose an undue hardship, it violated the Massachusetts anti-discrimination statute. It was ordered to pay damages to its former employee despite the fact that she did not recover sufficiently to work full-time as hoped.

The lesson for employers here is patent. Reasonable accommodation is an ongoing and fungible process that requires regular reassessment of workplace requirements and employee needs. Granting a work adjustment is not alone enough to satisfy the law, which requires an interactive engagement with employees in search of accommodations that are reasonable and appropriate under given circumstances. Employers who fail to understand that process as they seek to themselves decide what’s reasonable and what is not run the risk of lawsuits. In most cases, those suits can be avoided by careful consideration of what the law requires.

With the enactment of two marijuana laws in Massachusetts during the past few years, there’s never been much doubt that use of it would someday become a workplace issue. Now, the Supreme Judicial Court is taking up the issue in connection with medical marijuana use. It seems likely that similar legal questions regarding recreational use of the drug will also soon arise in the wake of the 2016 legalization of marijuana in the Commonwealth.

The current case involves an employee who was fired after she failed her employer’s mandatory drug test. She sued, claiming her rights were violated because she was legally authorized to use marijuana to treat Crohn’s Disease. According to the complaint, her employer told her it did not care about her medical authorization to use marijuana because it followed federal law, under which marijuana remains illegal. After the superior court dismissed her lawsuit, the SJC opted to hear her appeal. It will reportedly consider both whether the company violated Massachusetts anti-discrimination laws and whether employees can sue their employers under the medical marijuana statute.

The case signals problems on the horizon for employers on various fronts. Drug testing has long been a problematic policy that runs headlong into individual rights of privacy. Since testing can potentially uncover drug use that occurs outside work, employers need to respond to positive tests carefully. Now that marijuana is legal for recreational use in Massachusetts, complexities with testing and in other areas of the employer/employee relationship will likely multiply. The wisest course may be for employers to treat marijuana as they commonly do alcohol — by proscribing its use only while employees are working.